Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

The present study aimed to extend the work on the curve tracing task from Voyer and MacPherson (2020) in two experiments replacing the chronometric task they used with a psychometric mental rotation task. Both experiments also manipulated separation between the target and distractor curve to confirm that a zoom lens strategy is used in curve tracing and that this strategy preference is more common for men than women. Experiment 1 also aimed to replicate the correlation between curve tracing and Navon task performance, whereas Experiment 2 determined whether the correlation between curve tracing and mental rotation remained when the attention component was partialed out...

The Same-Different task presents two stimuli in close succession and participants must indicate whether they are completely identical or if there are any attributes that differ. While the task is simple, its results have proven difficult to explain. Notably, response times are characterized by a fast-same effect whereby Same responses are faster than Different responses even though identical stimuli should be exhaustively processed to be accurate. Herein, we examine a little more than a quarter million response times (N = 255,744) obtained from 327 participants who participated in one of 14 variants of the task involving minor changes in the stimuli or their durations...

A classic goal in cognitive modelling is the integration of process and representation to form complete theories of human cognition (Estes, 1955). This goal is best encapsulated by the seminal work of Simon (1969) who proposed the parable of the ant to describe the importance of understanding the environment that a person is embedded within when constructing theories of cognition. However, typical assumptions in accounting for the role of representation in computational cognitive models do not accurately represent the contents of memory (Johns & Jones, 2010)...

The Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (CJEP) publishes rigorous experimental psychology research through a fair and constructive review process. CJEP is supported and managed by the Canadian Psychological Association, who partners with the American Psychological Association with respect to journal production. CJEP represents world class research communities that affiliate with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Sciences (CPA), and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences section of CPA...

One of the most popular tasks used to test statistical learning (SL) involves asking participants to identify which of two stimuli, a triplet presented during the previous familiarization phase versus a new sequence made of the same stimuli never presented together, is more familiar based on the stream presented before, that is, to perform a two-alternative forced-choice (2-AFC) task. Despite the widespread use of this task, it has come under increasing criticism in current cognitive research due to psychometric flaws...

Attention allocation to positive and negative stimuli differs. For example, the flanker-interference asymmetry describes a pattern of results on flanker tasks using emotional stimuli, where a typical flanker-interference effect is observed for positive targets but not for negative targets. There are two dominant explanations for the flanker-interference asymmetry. According to the emotion-first explanation, negative targets are preferentially processed to facilitate the processing of potentially threatening stimuli...

There is converging evidence that readers monitor text coherence and consistency by immediate, nonstrategic processes of validation. The literature also offers numerous instances of deficient validation. A prominent example of the latter is that understanders tend to overlook discourse anomalies that are embedded in given (presupposed) sentence information. However, we previously documented reading time "consistency effects" (O'Brien & Albrecht, 1992) that exposed readers' sensitivity to both given and new text discrepancies in numerous declarative syntactic constructions (Singer et al...

Ambiguous but canonical idioms ( kick the bucket ) are processed fast in both their figurative ("die") and literal ("boot the pail") senses, although processing costs associated with meaning integration may emerge in postidiom regions. Modified versions ( the bucket was kicked ) are processed more slowly than canonical configurations when intended figuratively. We hypothesized that modifications delay idiom recognition and prioritize the literal meaning, yielding processing costs when the context warrants a figurative interpretation...

In serial reconstruction of order tasks, high-frequency words are better remembered than otherwise equivalent low-frequency words. Neath and Quinlan (2021) found that although the usual high-frequency advantage was observed when subjects received a block of low-frequency lists first followed by a block of high-frequency lists, there was no frequency effect when subjects received a block of high-frequency lists followed by a block of low-frequency lists. In order to assess whether the block order effect simply reflects the inherent changeability of frequency effects, we manipulated concreteness, a much more stable effect...

Elucidating the effects of negative emotion on eyewitness memory is an important part of understanding how witnesses remember and report criminal events. Extant research in this area has been inconsistent in its methodology and conclusions, thus warranting further empirical investigation. In the current experiment, participants ( N = 204) viewed either a Negative or Neutral version of a video of a staged social interaction and had their memory assessed either immediately or 1 week later. Memory assessment consisted of both recall and recognition (lineup identification) components...

The production effect refers to the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than those read silently. This pattern has most often been explained as arising from the incorporation of sensorimotor elements into the item representation at study, which could then be used to guide performance at later test. This theoretical framework views aloud items as being distinctive in relation to silent items, and thus the effect was thought to emerge only when production was manipulated within-subjects. This claim was later challenged, and a reliable (albeit smaller) between-subject production effect has since been shown in recognition memory...

Mentalizing, or reasoning about others' mental states, is a dynamic social cognitive process that aids in communication and navigating complex social interactions. We examined whether exposure to diverse perspectives, afforded by occupying influential social network positions, predicted bilingual adults' performances on a behavioral mentalizing rating task in regions of high and low linguistic diversity. We calculated the degree to which respondents' social network position generally bridged unconnected others (i...

In task selection, a verbal cue is interpreted as more meaningful, and thus, it can elicit a faster response than an arbitrary cue. To investigate the effect of verbal cues on activating target task information, we combined an eye-tracking technique with a task-switching paradigm using an arbitrary cue and a type of verbal cue-a word cue with a short cue-target interval (CTI) and long CTI. We measured stimulus-selection time (time to orienting a stimulus) and postselection response time (time to respond to a stimulus after orienting to the stimulus) and separately examined the differential effect of cue types on these divided response times...

This study investigated young children's ability to draw psychological and nonpsychological inferences during reading comprehension. Whereas nonpsychological inferences require the retrieval of general background knowledge, psychological inferences rely on more contextualised knowledge relating to mental states. Based on several pretests, children, who were able to read fluently, aged 7-8 years (second graders; n = 42) and 8-9 years (third graders; n = 46) were assigned to either a skilled comprehenders group or a less skilled comprehenders group, based on their listening comprehension...

Healthy ageing is characterized by changes in several cognitive functions, including episodic memory and inhibition. While the age-related decrease in the ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli is often associated with lower performance, especially in episodic memory, some studies have highlighted the boosting effect of distraction in several tasks in older adults, including episodic memory tasks related to recollection. The aim of this article is to review and compare previous studies according to specific study features and to consider the results in light of the dual-process model of recollection and familiarity that were used by the authors of the reviewed articles...

Several studies using the production of 1-s intervals report instability in the results. This suggests that there is no clear representation of the value of 1 s in long-term memory. This instability may partly be explained by the specific methodological requirements of studies using 1-s production tasks. Typically, this task requires participants to produce 1-s intervals by either using two intermittent finger taps (one at the beginning and one at the end of the interval), or by continuously pressing a key for the duration of the second...

Intentional forgetting aims to prevent unwanted information from being stored in long-term memory. Surprisingly, past research has shown that, relative to younger adults, older adults recall and recognize more to-be-forgotten information. It has been suggested that this occurs because older adults have a deficient ability to inhibit information. In two experiments, we examined memory differences between older and younger adults in an item-method directed forgetting task. Participants viewed words one at a time during a study phase, each followed by a cue to remember (R) or to forget (F)...

A Festschrift (the German word standing for feast-script) is a collection of essays to celebrate the significant contributions of a scholar to their respective field of studies. Here, it is our honour to introduce this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology as a Festschrift for William (Bill) E. Hockley to celebrate his rich scholarly contributions to the field of cognitive psychology, specifically on human memory. The diversity of articles in this issue highlights the depth and range of Bill's contributions to the study of human memory and cognition...

Research investigating how attentional demands impacts audiovisual (AV) integration has used a variety of multisensory tasks and procedures to manipulate attentional demands, leading to very differing results. Also, the secondary tasks used to increase attentional demands draw on the sensory modalities already being investigated; for example, a visual distracter task may be used to increase attentional demands in an audiovisual integration task. It is therefore not clear whether the additional task interfered with sensory processing or with audiovisual integration...

In our prior research, average recognition memory response bias tended to be conservative when stimuli were paintings, whereas bias for common English words tended to be liberal or neutral. Efforts to understand the mechanism(s) underlying this materials-based bias effect (MBBE) have yielded new questions but no definitive answers. Here, we report a set of studies exploring the possibility that participants respond more conservatively to paintings because they expect the novel, visually rich paintings to evoke a strong, detailed memory experience at test, whereas the more familiar, visually similar words are not expected to produce this kind of vivid recollection as often...